


If I Don't Have You

by yukikun13



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/F, No Storm, Pricefield Week 2019, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-11-27 22:44:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20956133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yukikun13/pseuds/yukikun13
Summary: Without Chloe, every day is filled with repeated slaps to the face. The memories are too strong and the heartbreak pushes Max to the edge. She had done everything to save the world for everyone else, but is a world without Chloe still a world she wants to be a part of?An entry into Pricefield Week 2019 on Tumblr, organized by @drinkwaterkids and my good friend @sailor-tenchi.





	1. The Moment

**Author's Note:**

> Day One: Time/Support

I’ve rewound a thousand times by now.

After doing it for so long I thought I would be used to the feeling of having my body rip through the breach of time, but each time is just as painful and agonizing as the last. The only difference between the first time and the newest last time is the fact that my nosebleeds aren’t as frequent as they were. I’m stronger.

At least physically.

I jump through timelines like I am playing double-dutch with fifteen pairs of ropes. Each jump leaves a slap against my body that burns long after I’ve returned to the present. I’ve done this so many times I’ve forgotten what the present even is. Living in the moment is no longer applicable once you have lived a moment ten times over.

Some days are harder than others.

I swore I would never mess with time again, but I’ve never been good at keeping promises even if I fully meant to follow through with them.

As long as I don’t touch anything, I’m fine. Time, the present, continues to march on as if I never left it in order to dive back into the past and relive a moment just one more time.

If I just act normally I can go back to when Chloe was looking up at the sky, pointing a gun towards the heavens and no doubt imagining the best way to deliver the final blow to the forces that always tried to snuff her out.

In the end, whatever sick fuck was up there managed to get the jump on her instead.

I can go back to the lazy morning where Chloe and I barely stirred on her bed. I can take a few more seconds to bathe in the smell of her room and the warmth of her smile. I can look into her eyes and see all the life behind them.

When I look at her, I’m torn between wanting to spill my guts out to her and biting my tongue to keep the present safe. One wrong move and the entire world that I know could be cracked and all the life in it can be blown into oblivion.

It’s taken me weeks, but I’ve finally realized that the aching sting I’ve been feeling wasn’t going away. It’s swelled like the invisible welts on my legs and arms from crossing so many timelines.

So there’s only one thing I can do now.

I’m going back.

Even if I get torn in half, or bleed out from lacerations, or even die from the pain of ripping myself in two for a time-jump, I’ve realized that this moment isn’t worth it without her.

Nothing is worth it without her.


	2. You, Me, and the Other Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pricefield Week Day Two: Pirates/Partners

I went back.

All the way back.

Back to when I knew I was leaving Chloe in a few days and hadn’t told her.

Back to only a couple of hours or so before Chloe would lose William and I, not knowing so myself, would feel the way my heart could drop out of my chest for the first time due to the loss of someone I loved.

I hugged William extra tight. I held onto him and let the feeling of his bear-hug across my shoulders seep into me like a weighted blanket. It felt just as bad sending William out to his doom as it did watching Chloe get hit by the train over and over…

Maybe I didn’t have to.

I had seen things change once, but maybe… Maybe… I could change them even more.

I told him to take the bus. He survived that way last time. He wasn’t able to resist my persistent yammering about the convenience or practicality of it. Then he was gone.

One down, one to go.

“Chloe,” I said. I turned to her and she met me with one raised blonde eyebrow.

“You’re acting really fucking weird,” Chloe said. She could barely wait until William was out of the house to unleash the swear words that were, ironically, the source of her college fund.

“Just listen to me,” I said. My mouth went dry. I looked at her and fidgeted before I reached out and took her hands in mine. “I’m… Chloe, my dad got a new job in Seattle, and I’m leaving in a few days.”

“Wait, wha—“

“Stop, just listen!” I demanded. My voice sounded frail and my fingers tightened against hers. She just needed to listen. She closed her mouth but looked frustrated and impatient. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I… I didn’t know how to get the words out. But I don’t have a lot of time and I need to get everything out now before it’s too late.” She rolled her eyes and I quickly started talking before she could. “I… I love you, Chloe.”

My heart was racing. I felt like my hands were going to sweat so much that hers would slip out of them without much prompting. She looked at me with a fleeting look of surprise and discomfort before she cleared her throat and shrugged. “I love you too, Max… But you know that. Best friends forever and shit, right?”

“No, Chloe, I…” Fuck. My face felt hot. “I mean… I _like_ you, Chloe. I _like_-like you, more than a best friend, more than my Captain…”

Chloe looked at me with a slightly longer shocked expression. She looked down at our hands and, after a few seconds, glanced up at me before looking back down. “So… Like… _Like_-like me, huh…?” she muttered. I nodded and her thumbs slowly started to rub on the knuckles of my fingers. I watched her face, waiting for her to look back up at me, and the seconds were long before I was granted my wish. “So… If I… If I did something… You wouldn’t hate me, right…?” Chloe asked. The way her eyes flicked back and forth between mine made me nervous, and I was suddenly aware that I was doing it to her, too.

“Never…” I answered with a dry mouth.

And slowly, like in those cheesy romance movies, Chloe squeezed my hands a little tighter and then leaned in and kissed me.

I melted.

Maybe this time… Maybe this time it would work.

* * *

The bus took too long.

As I came to and felt each bump of the bus tires beneath my seat, I realized that I was riding down the un-repaired streets of Arcadia Bay. There was a small suitcase in the seat next to me and my shoulder bag across my lap.

I ripped open the bag to look in my journal. Photos of me and Chloe were everywhere. Doodles and drawings constantly highlighted every mischievous smirk and glare that I had seen Chloe make a thousand times. Detailed accounts of us adventuring, getting into Blackwell, living our high school years, unfolded themselves in my messy scrawl. I had gone to Seattle over the long weekend to see my family because they said they missed me… I was coming home.

I looked out the window and, waiting at the bus stop, saw a familiar pirate hat and a tall, lanky, beautiful girl hunched over the bench and bouncing her knees impatiently. She saw the bus and stood before she shoved her hands in her pockets and leaned back a little.

I practically threw myself off the bus as soon as I could. “Chloe!” I exclaimed with relief. She stepped up to me and quickly scooped me into her arms. She nearly cleared me from the concrete and I let go of my suitcase in order to hold myself up. “What’s with the hat?” I asked. I expected to see blue hair and a beanie, but instead got blonde with one blue streak and a pirate hat. She chuckled as she pulled away.

“You’ve been gone so long I thought you might not recognize me without it,” she said. I rolled my eyes.

“It’s been three days,” I reminded her.

She shrugged and lifted her hand to the side of my face. Her fingers played with my hair. “Felt longer…” she grumbled. As her fingers pulled away, I saw the flash of pink in the corner of my eyes.

“Pink…?” I asked. I lifted my hand to my hair and pulled at the section Chloe had just played with.

She looked at me and her expression got a little grim. I looked at her and shot her a small, questioning eyebrow-raise in response. “Wha—“

“You’re not you anymore… Are you…?”


	3. Resetting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pricefield Week Day Three: style/always

She’d been smoking for the past five minutes. The atmosphere was thick enough without the suffocating stench of burning tobacco and tar, but now it was nearly insufferable. She hadn’t looked at me. She hadn’t said another word. All she’d done was stare at her dashboard while she lit one cigarette after another, quietly thinking. I asked and she let silence be her response to every question. Once I didn’t get anywhere with words I tried to leave, thinking that maybe the walk back to Blackwell would be better for the two of us than trying to force some sort of conversation. She stopped me with a quick fling of her arm in front of me. She didn’t want to talk, but she apparently didn’t want me to leave right now either.

So I sat there, just waiting.

I watched the end of her cigarette burn, fluctuating between red and gray. The ash dropped by itself and left tiny dust fragments on the floor and the trash piled on the bottom of the truck. It was a romantic description of a disgusting habit.

Changing the past couldn’t get Chloe to stop smoking, apparently.

Another drop of ash kept my eyes focused as I watched the gray, flimsy flake disappear. She pushed out another visible exhale before she stubbed the cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray. Old cigarettes fell out and joined the new ashes on the floor.

Although she wasn’t smoking, she still didn’t look at me.

“Chloe, I—“

Her mouth tightened and I lost my speech. I wasn’t expecting her to react this way… After all, I was still _me_…

_“You’re not you anymore… Are you…?”_

I didn’t know what that meant but it was enough to make Chloe silent.

“… How long?”

“What?” I asked, a little confused.

“How long,” she repeated, her words tense, “Since you came back?”

Discomfort rooted itself in my chest. “Just before I got here… On the bus…” I explained. That answer didn’t seem to be one that she wanted and she let out another rough groan. She dug into the pack of cigarettes again and lit another one. “How… Did you know I wasn’t me…?”

Chloe snorted. “You were surprised by your hair, remember?” she asked. She held her cigarette in between her lips as she pulled on her own blue streak. “We’ve had these for weeks, Max. You wanted to do something cool that made us look—“ She stopped and released the azure tendrils before she looked at the dashboard again and sighed. She tapped the inside of her hand against the side of the steering wheel while the other held her cigarette aloft in the air.

“Look what? And I didn’t mean how I knew just… How did you know I _would_ be…?”

Chloe cringed and sighed. “You’ve done it before...” she explained, “A couple of times... Normally not for very long stretches of time. You do that shit with your hand and you go back, and by the time you get back to the original spot you almost... Reset, I guess.” Chloe’s hand stopped beating on her wheel in order to scratch her head. “It’s been a while since you did it... I thought maybe we were finally _done_...”

“Done?”

“Yeah,” she said, agreeing quickly, “Done with the... Fucking _resetting_. Done with having to explain shit. Done with your memories just starting and stopping all over again...” Chloe shivered and started to bounce her knee. “Every time it happens I gotta explain this shit all over and it sucks because you get a free pass at life because you don’t remember.”

Her voice was harsh, but she wasn’t wrong. I didn’t remember. Why I didn’t remember was the key question. Did my powers wake up within the other me? Was I able to rewind in an alternate timeline, thus creating another, and another? How many times had I split my reality in half and left Chloe behind with only a fragment of my real self to grasp onto?

No wonder she was mad.

I clutched the captain's hat in my lap. Chloe had discarded it on the dash earlier and now it was a comfort item. My fingers traced over the worn edge, the leather soft and dull, and I felt the heaviness settle in my chest.

“I’m sorry...” I said. The words seemed inadequate. They lacked the support I wanted and needed to give them.

Chloe moved her head. She must have looked at me because I heard the sound. When I looked up, though, she had already looked away. Her fingers continued to dig at her scalp. “At least that never changes...” she muttered bitterly. Another few seconds of silence were eaten before Chloe lifted her cigarette to her mouth and took another drag. “You’re always quiet and you’re always sorry,” she said bitterly while she exhaled another plume of smoke.

I looked at the hat for another second before I looked back at her. Her face had already turned away. In another time, I may have thought that the smoke swirling around her face, almost glancing off the sharp edge of her chin, might be a great photo, but now wasn’t the time. Even if I took it and rewound I might get us into even _more_ trouble. She noticed my stare and glanced back at me. After a few seconds, she sighed again. “Go ahead,” she said, sounding impatient and grumbly, “You’ve got that look on your face like you’ve got a million things you wanna ask.”

Per usual, I was an open book to Chloe.

If only I could be that much of an open book to _myself_.


	4. What About Now?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pricefield Week Day Four: SMS/photo

As Chloe started the ignition, my mind started to churn as well. The undeniable curiosity would always find some foothold even in the worst of silences. Now given an invitation, it was like my mind had been unleashed and given the chance to run and roam without any guidelines or barriers. My insatiable mind could find solace in some answers... Or maybe heartbreak. 

“When did we do this?” I asked, starting with something purposely innocent as I held up the pink-stained strand of my hair. I couldn’t imagine that it went over well with the parental units. 

Chloe sighed. “Given free rein and that’s what you ask?” she muttered. She pressed on the gas and started to pull the truck away from the curb where she had parked it. The familiar groan of it was comforting even though it was indicative that the car could fall apart in a second. That hadn’t changed, either. “A few weeks ago. I had to re-do mine and you said you wanted us to match,” she explained simply. “Pink’s more your style,” she remarked, “Or, at least, that’s what you told me.” The small amount of bitterness in her voice wasn’t hard to miss. 

“I wanted us to match?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she answered. She didn’t embellish. 

“Because we’re... Best friends...?”

Chloe flinched a little and her grip tightened on the wheel. I watched as she tried to play it off by shifting her shoulder and resting harder into her seat. “Yeah...” she said, “Best friends...” Her tone was quiet. I swallowed back my hesitation and finally spoke up again. 

“Or... Because we’re... Girlfriends...?”

Chloe’s eyes widened and she shot me a quick, shocked glance before she turned back to the road. She was staring at the path in front of the vehicle unusually hard and left me sitting and waiting for a reply. 

“… We _were…_” she answered slowly, sadly. The way that she spoke so definitively made my heart sink a little more. The grumble of the tired against pavement filled in the otherwise-deafening silence. “I… Don’t know what we are _now_.”

“What do you mean?” Max asked.

Chloe hummed softly before she sighed. “We’ve been a thing since we were kids, Max. You and me. The power couple, the partners-in-crime, everything. Are you telling me you’d be fine with that still, not knowing everything we’ve been through and everything we’ve done?”

I continued to feel the solid ache in my chest. Chloe was right: I didn’t have those memories and I would never get them back. I would never be able to realize what had happened _before_ now, and the precious events that Chloe might be holding onto were now lost to everyone except her. 

“That’s what I thought,” her dismissive tone came through again. She rolled her shoulder again and readjusted her grip before the truck picked up a little bit of speed. 

“No, Chloe, that’s not—“

“It’s fine, Max,” she lied, “It’s fine. Just fucking forget it.” More dismissal came out as she tried to push me off. I looked at her and felt my chest capsizing in on itself. I had gone through all of this to _be_ here with her, but now I was managing to push her away and make things _worse_…

I looked down at my lap and slowly moved the captain’s hat off of my lap. I let it rest on the dashboard, a worn white skull looking at me with hollow eyes. I stared back at it, letting the emptiness match how horrible I felt. I looked at the floor and picked up my bag before I started to rummage through for my journal. There had to be something in here… Something…

Pictures.

I managed to grab a few when I took out the book and looked at them: Chloe and I standing on the pier by the beach with wide smiles and faces kissed red by the setting sun; Chloe standing by the bathroom sink, blue dye next to her and in her hair, her middle finger extended high and aimed at me; Chloe and I in her room, laying on the bed, with her face snuggled into my shoulder as I took a selfie from as high as my arms could go…

“… We were finally happy…” I murmured. I continued to flip through the pictures and dug through my bag for more of them. As I came up empty, I let another sigh slip through my lips. 

“… There’s more… If you wanna see them…” Chloe spoke quietly. I looked up at her and caught the tail-end of her eyes as they flitted away from looking at me. She continued to watch the road as if she had never been distracted for a second. I looked at her and nodded. 

“Yeah… I do wanna see them…” I told her. There was the slightest twitch of her mouth, something that almost created a smile, and she nodded a little before she refocused on driving. 

Maybe… _Maybe_… I might be able to pull something together by what she showed me next…

After all… We looked happy in these photos…

That meant we could be happy now too, didn’t it?


	5. My Last Past Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pricefield Week Day Five: First time/Future

The house hadn’t changed. Not really. When we drove up to it, the only considerable difference I noticed was that the entire structure was now the dark blue that had remained unfinished in my previous timeline. Chloe’s hair seemed almost neon in comparison to its dark shade, even though she had been the one to pick the color originally. I stared out the window in awe at it even after Chloe parked in the driveway. The grind of the gears as Chloe finished driving hit my ears, followed by the sound of the engine shutting off and whirring to a chugging stop. 

“You never seen a house before, hippie?” Chloe asked. 

“It’s... _Blue_.”

“Uh, yeah... Been that way for like... three or four years, dude,” she responded. I pulled my gaze away to look at her and finally our eyes met for the first time since that awkward moment at the train station. We held the stare for a few seconds before we both looked away. She cleared her throat and then said, “C’mon, all our stuff’s in my room.”

I followed Chloe into the house. It looked almost exactly the same, just with a few updates. New wallpaper. New paint. It still smelled like eggs and cinnamon, like a home that was actually lived and cooked in. It was even neater than I remembered it. I didn’t have enough time to look as Chloe was already half-way up the stairs, stomping as she went. I put my palm on the banister and looked out into the living room, or what little I could see down the hallway, before I started to follow Chloe. 

I had taken this path many times since my childhood, but this time it was different. I was walking towards where the history of my life laid now, a history I would never be able to touch even though I had technically _lived_ it. It was one of the uncomfortable parts of time-travel… I had to do it when I had first saved Arcadia Bay, too…

“Max?”

Chloe’s curious voice called out and I snapped back to reality. I had reached the top of the stairs and Chloe’s door was open. It was an inviting entrance, not that it had ever been a hostile one for me, and I swallowed a little before I walked in and looked around.

It was messy, sure, like usual, but…

Warm.

It was warm. 

There weren’t as many punk posters on the walls. Expletive-ridden graffiti had been replaced with beautiful, macabre drawings. They weren’t _my_ style, but Chloe made them intricate and detailed, holding a dark complexity that caught my eye even if I had wanted to look away. I looked at them and found my eyes tracing along the lines on Chloe’s walls. The drawings bled into each other, sometimes disrupted by stylized text, and covered her walls from floor to ceiling. “Oh my dog…” I breathed. I couldn’t help but be surprised and in awe at the display. I knew that Chloe was a talented artist, as talented as she was intelligent, but I felt like I was being hit with this knowledge all over again…

I heard Chloe chuckle behind me. “I think you said the same thing when you saw that the first time, too,” she explained. She seemed to be in a little bit of a better mood now that I was letting myself get comfortably lost within her atmosphere. I looked over my shoulder to face her and saw she was standing in the center of her room, hands deep in her pockets and shoulders pressed back as if she were lounging on air. “You finally came to get me because it’d been like a _day_ since I had answered you and you were _pissed_. Then you came in here, ready to chew my ass out, and you saw this and didn’t say a word for a looooong time.”

I felt a little bit of heat in my face. “Oh, great, so I’m one of _those…_” I said, grumbling. For all the dreaming I had done over the past few weeks without Chloe, I hadn’t ever depicted myself as the crazy girlfriend who couldn’t survive on her own without her partner for more than twenty-four hours… 

Chloe cleared her throat. When I looked back up I saw how she was looking away from me and scratching a little at the back of her neck. I wasn’t sure why she was nervous, but her tell gave it away every time… “So… Uh… It’s all over here…” She gestured to the opposite wall, near her closet and hidden behind her door, with her hand before she slid it back into her pocket. 

I pulled the door away from the wall and let it guide itself to close. Where Chloe’s blue desk had been was suddenly empty space, and all over the walls were pictures. _My_ pictures. At least ten or eleven packages worth if not _more._ My heart sunk at the sheer amount of monetary value on the wall, but it didn’t last long as I was drawn into each photo and stared at them. 

Big smiles. They were everywhere, in every photo. The photos ranged from our early teenage years to more recent, but the smiles were still the same. We were bathed in sunlight, in moonlight, red-eyed from the flash, and picture-perfect. None of the pictures were the same, but they all inspired the same feeling within my chest. 

“Oh my dog…” I repeated a little softer this time. I heard Chloe’s boots walk softly over the wood floors but I didn’t look at her. 

“Do you …Remember any of this?” she asked me hesitantly. She seemed to know the answer before even asking the question, but there was an amount of hopefulness in her voice that made me wish I didn’t have to tell her the truth. 

I slowly shook my head and then turned back to look at her. “I… It’s like I can _see_ that it’s us… But I feel like I’m seeing everything for the first time… Like we made it up…” I didn’t want to tell her, particularly because her face became visibly distraught for a few seconds like I anticipated. She looked up at the wall again and then stepped a little closer to my back before she pointed at a photo. 

“This was the first snow after you moved to Seattle,” she said, “It was the first time I didn’t have you here, and I missed you so much that your parents sent you here for a week over Christmas break. We stayed up late and stayed outside all day making snowmen and having snowball fights.” The picture she pointed at was of us, standing in the snow and grinning up at the camera. Chloe’s arms were wrapped tightly around my body as if she’d pick me up, but I looked like I couldn’t be happier.

“And this one…” Chloe said, pointing to another, “Was a few days before you started Blackwell… You came early to spend the last few days of summer with me.” We were sitting on the pier near the beach, and the flash was barely enough to light us up as ghosts against a dark navy sky. It was easily one of the crummier pictures on the wall, especially considering we looked like we were possessed, but I could see the emotional appeal of it. 

I scanned the photos again and saw one near the top. Chloe was kissing my cheek and I was laughing, my eyes closed, clearly having been surprised just as my finger triggered the shutter. “And that one…?” I asked, pointing to it. 

I felt Chloe tense up behind me. She had gotten very close without me realizing it. I was practically pressed against her now. “That… Was when I came to see you in Seattle the summer after you left… Technically our first date, since your parents would let us go out alone…” she explained, quietly, “We spent the entire day around the city and we took this right after we got onto the Space Needle…” My hand came down slowly and I rested it on my hip.

“Our first date…” I muttered. “… I don’t even remember that…” How I wanted to. I was so _desperate_ to remember. But I didn’t. Those memories would be locked away and I would never get to experience them again… Not in the organic way that I had in this alternate lifetime. 

“It’s okay, Max, it’s not a big deal—“

“No, it _is_ a big deal!” I said. My voice was a little more forceful and squealed a little harder than I intended, but I meant how it sounded. “I don’t get to know how it felt to go around with you on our first date? I don’t get to remember how that _felt_ when you kissed me? I don’t get to remember that at all, and I can’t _ever_ get that back, because you’ve already done it once and it won’t be the same!”

I looked at Chloe, wondering if my words made sense, and she looked at me for a few seconds before she pulled her hand back from the photos and scratched her neck. “Fuck, if you’re mad about _that_, you’re gonna be _really_ pissed when you know about what else’s happened…”

“About what else—?” I asked. She continued to look at me, mouth thin, and after a few seconds I connected the dots. “Oh my do—“ I started for the third time before my hands clapped themselves over my mouth. My fingers touched my cheekbones and I could feel the warmth beneath them. “We’ve… Oh my dog…!!!” 

“It’s not a big deal—“

“Stop saying that! Yes, it is!” I demanded. I pulled my hands down regardless of the fact that Chloe would be able to see how deeply I was blushing. “It’s a big deal because it’s you, and it’s a big deal because I’m _supposed_ to remember that! I’m supposed to remember that and treasure it for the rest of my _life_!” 

Even though I was hysterically shouting at her, Chloe stayed calm. Somberly calm. She studied me for a few seconds before she looked down between us. Her mouth moved a few times before she slowly extended her hands and guided her fingertips to the outside of mine. “We… Can make new memories, Max…” she said softly, “Maybe not the first memories for _me_… But… They’ll be the first ones I have with _you_…” She looked up for a second and slid her fingers a little further into my palms. “If that’s okay with you…”

I couldn’t look away from her. She looked at me and I felt like I would dissolve in her eyes. She was so close and I could hear her soft breathing only a little over the rampant beating of my heart in my chest. “That’d… Be okay with you…?” I muttered.

Chloe’s eyes flicked a few times between mine. “Yeah…” she answered. She shuffled a little closer and I could see that her head was slowly tilting down and forward. Her eyes stayed steady on mine as she got closer. I felt my own body tense up and then relax, my fingertips closing in on her hands. 

In a few seconds, my eyes closed, and then I finally felt the feeling of Chloe’s mouth on mine. It was warm and soft and tasted nothing like the rainy kiss we had shared on our last day together. There was no salty sting from tears we’d cried dried on our lips, her hands weren’t cold and warm at the same time, and there wasn’t the roar of wind around us. 

It was nothing like that first kiss we shared. Even in this lifetime it wasn’t the first kiss I had ever shared with Chloe, but I would take it. 

I would take a million more kisses if they stayed like this first one. 


	6. What Wasn't Before

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pricefield Week Day Six: Canon-Divergence / Music

If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that I had stopped time to stay in this moment. If I couldn’t hear my own breath, feel the heavy pulse of my heartbeat in the base of my neck, or feel the way that Chloe’s lips moved against mine, I would have thought that I had forced time to stop just so I could feel this indefinitely. It was as if I was parched for this affection and had finally been rewarded with the drop of it I had needed all this time. There was no rush to expose all of my feelings in this one kiss. There wasn’t a death-threat lingering around us. It was just us, in Chloe’s room, holding hands and letting kisses flow in a smooth, soft rhythm.

I shivered before I tightened my hands in hers and leaned up a little more. I didn’t want her to pull away. This was perfect. This was _everything_ I had wanted…

I heard footsteps on the stairs and that was what eventually pulled me out of my pleasantly delirious stupor. “Dav—“ I started to say, a rush of panic in my voice, but it was too late. The door burst open and I pulled away from Chloe as if a bomb would explode between us.

But it wasn’t David standing in the doorway. Instead, it was a little boy, about five or six, staring at us with wide eyes. He was pale and had dirty-blonde hair with some of the edges of his bangs tinted blue, and very bright blue eyes. I stared at him and watched as his smile grew to take over his entire face. “Max! You’re back! I missed you!” he said as he dropped the book bag he was carrying and leaped at me. I barely caught him in my arms as he hugged me, and I shot Chloe a panicked look as I held him.

“I… missed you too!” I forced out, trying to sound convincing. I put him down as his grip loosened and he looked at me with his eyes bright and curious.

“Were you guys _kissing_?” he asked, his tone teasing but enough that Chloe groaned.

“All right, pipsqueak, get outta here,” she said. She stepped forward and started pushing him out the door while also leaning over and grabbing his bag. “Don’t you have homework to do? You gotta get that shit done so you can get into Blackwell when you’re older.”

He gasped as he struggled against Chloe’s pushing. “DAD! CHLOE SAID A BAD WORD!”

“Chloe,” I heard a voice join footsteps on the stairs and my breath caught in my airway. “I thought we talked about this,” the voice continued, calm and even, “You’re going to be able to save up for _his_ college fund at this rate.”

When the footsteps stopped, I found myself staring at the tall, familiar face of William Price. I never thought I would see his face again, not after not seeing it for _years_, and I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds. “Oh, Max, you’re back!” he said, the warmth of his smile giving a small relief to my suffocation as I smiled back automatically. “Welcome home. You have fun seeing your folks?” he asked.

“Uh, y-yeah,” I answered, still feeling too shocked by the two faces I wasn’t expecting to see.

“Did your dad send back that beer he was talking about?” William grinned. I stared at him for a few seconds too long before I suddenly realized that it must have been something the _other_ me had known about.

“I think it’s in my suitcase. I’ll go get it,” I said. He held up his hand and shook his head.

“I’ll get it. You’ve had a long trip, and you’ve been on the bus since _early_ if you got here already. You stay and settle down a little. Joyce’s got some stuff to finish up at school but she’ll be home later and I’m sure she’ll be _dying_ to make you dinner.” William looked down and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders before he squeezed them. “What do you think, Jamie, ready to get some homework done so we can help your mom make some food later?”

“Yeah!” the boy, Jamie, responded. He turned and looked at Chloe and me before grinning widely. “Bye Max! Bye Chloe!” he said, and Chloe pushed him a little to get him further out the door.

“Work on your language, will you, sweetheart?” William said to Chloe as Jamie clumsily stomped down the stairs in a fashion that almost sounded like how Chloe normally did.

“Yeah, yeah… Sorry… It’s been a rough day…” she said. She reached for the back of her neck and rubbed on it.

“I’d say. You were up and ready for Max to get home before your mom was,” he joked.

“I thought it was a half-day for half-pint? Doesn’t that mean she gets to come back too?”

“A half-day for the students, yes. For teachers not so much,” he said with a small shrug. “Sorry for spoiling your plans that you’d have the house all to yourself for a little while,” he continued to tease. He looked at me and then back to Chloe. “Keep it down up here, okay? You don’t want him walking in on anything e—”

“Okay, _bye_!” Chloe exclaimed before reaching out her arms and pushing her dad on the shoulders. He laughed as he backed out of her room and walked down the stairs. Chloe shut the door a little too hard as he walked away and looked back at me. Her face had a tinge of maroon added to her cheeks, and that expression made mine light up as I realized what he must have been inferring.

“We… He _knows_?!” I asked, my voice squeaky and hollow.

Chloe looked at me and then looked up to her ceiling. She bit her bottom lip while she paused, maybe buying time as she looked for the words she wanted. “Yeah…” she eventually decided. “We… Weren’t the _best_ at being discrete…”

The thought of Joyce and William catching us in any sort of way made me want to throw up. I put my hands over my eyes and groaned. “Oh my dog…” I murmured, “I can’t believe we got caught…”

Chloe chuckled and came closer to me. I felt her fingers squeeze against my elbow. “Funnily enough, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what you said after, too. After you spent half an hour not looking at me because you were so embarrassed.” I pulled my hands down from my face and pushed her playfully.

“That’s not funny!” I told her.

“I think it’s fucking _hysterical_,” she responded. She had a confident smirk on her face, the kind that said that she _knew_ she was right, and I didn’t have the words to refute it. She looked at me and then, after a few seconds, asked, “You have no idea who Jamie is, do you?”

I looked at her and the shock must have been clear on my face because she nodded and pulled her mouth into a thin line again. “He’s five. Born the year you left. He thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

I coughed a little. “Looks like he idolizes _you_ though… You guys have matching hair.”

“Yeah… Mom was _pissed_.” That brought a tiny smile back to her face.

“And… Your mom… She’s… Teaching?” I asked.

Chloe looked at me and then her eyebrows furrowed. “Yeah… For like… Two years now…” she explained. Another pause moved between us and she asked, “Max… Do you mean that she _wasn’t_ before…?”

I took in a soft breath and looked her in the eye. “Apparently… We both are going to have memories that the other one won’t know about…” I said. Of course, I didn’t expect Chloe to not have the memories of the world that we left behind, but I wasn’t expecting drastic changes… I was just hoping that she would be _alive_. It was too much to hope that William would be too…

Chloe looked pensive for a second before she finally said, “Tell me.” I looked at her and was about to shake my head before she repeated again, “Tell me. I wanna know.”


	7. We Were Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pricefield Week Day Seven: Only and One / Dream

The light of mid-afternoon had dissolved into the deep orange of early evening. Sunlight had streamed into Chloe’s room uninhibited by flags and rustic curtains and had disappeared softly as the hours had gone by. As I divulged in the details of a life she didn’t know, of a future that she and I had gone through that she would never know, she looked at me. She watched me with an intense stare, her attention focused enough hat I felt as if she could see physical words as they came out of my mouth. There were a few times where she stopped to ask questions, seeking more clarification to the subtle details I tried to gloss over, and more times where she stopped, got up, grabbed her package of cigarettes, and stopped before she made it out of her bedroom. I had playfully joked that the other Chloe wouldn’t have even gone to leave the room and would have just lit up in here. That hadn’t gone over well: the protectiveness over Jamie was apparently enough of a deterrent. “That,” she said, “And you always hated it when I smoked right in front of you.”

The more details I gave to her, the worse I felt we were sinking. We were getting lost into the depths of a past, or a future, where nothing was the same as it was now.

I told her that William had died. I explained that we had left for Seattle and I, being the suckiest friend in the universe, had let our relationship fall into quicksand and left it to drown. I told her about Rachel and David and Frank, as many details as I could even though I felt woefully underprepared, and about Rachel’s disappearance. I told her about Nathan in the bathroom, how Chloe had nearly become one of his subjects and she had cornered him about it. I told her how she died, how I saved her, how we reconnected. I explained the glorious moments of our week together and peppered in the terrifying and adventurous ones for contrast.

As I got to the end of our story, I found myself reliving the memory of “our” last few moments together. Her voice was so crystal clear in my head even though the Chloe in front of me had barely said a word this entire time. I told her as much as I could remember, about how we had argued on the cliffside while the lives of those in Arcadia Bay were slowly getting closer to being snuffed out. I told her about her bravery, about how she had accepted her relationship with David at the bitter end and had, ultimately, wanted to sacrifice everything she was for a town that she had promised to turn to glass only days before.

I ended it by explaining about the weeks that followed. I talked about the loneliness, how the light in Joyce’s eyes seemed to disappear completely, and how my own pathway to the future was darkened as if someone had broken all of the streetlights along the way.

We sat in silence. She sat on the middle of her bed, cross-legged, still staring at me intensely. She had been squeezing her hands against her ankle for the past ten minutes or so and her knuckles were almost white. I looked up at her and half-smiled even though I didn’t have the energy or the desire to. The story wasn’t my favorite by a long shot. It hurt to relive as much as to tell it, and Chloe’s lack of reactions hadn’t helped. Her stoic expression made me panic a little. What if she thought that, after all we had been through, that my choice to come back was a mistake? What if she told me the same thing now, that I shouldn’t have come back and that I should have just left well-enough alone?

Just because we were safe now didn’t mean we always would be.

She took in a deep breath and let it out heavily. “Fuck…” she swore gently. It was an ironic word choice considering the tenderness of her tone. She released one hand from her ankle and rubbed the heel of her palm across her eyes. Maybe it was an expression of exhaustion, or maybe it was a way to fight back the tears that had been slowly building up.

“Yeah…” I said. It was an understatement of an answer and I knew it. I swallowed but my mouth and throat were dry. I had been talking for a _long_ time. There was a _lot_ to unpack between the two of us.

“… Is another storm going to come…?”

The question wasn’t one I was necessarily surprised by, but I tried to swallow again unsuccessfully before I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know…” I answered, “I… Went so far back… And changed so little… But so much happened in this timeline that I’m not sure what else _might_ change from this point on… Maybe we’ll be swallowed up and I won’t be able to go back, or maybe we’ll be fine…”

Was it stupid to hope that, for once, everything might be _okay_ from here on out?

Probably.

Chloe nodded slowly and then turned to look back down at her bed. She looked deep in thought. I was quiet for another few seconds before I asked, “Do you… Want me to go…?”

Chloe didn’t look up. She didn’t move at all. “… I don’t think so…” she answered slowly. She didn’t meet my eyes, but at least words were coming out. “I just… I don’t know what to do, Max.” While most people wouldn’t be shocked by that, I was. Chloe _always_ knew what to do. There was always a plan, even if it was half-baked, that Chloe would be able to run wild with.

I looked down at the bed. I was sitting cross-legged with my hands loosely in my lap. I put them together and started to rub my thumbs against each other, making a small circular motion between them. “I’m sorry…” I whispered. I didn’t look up this time, “I didn’t think… Trying to fix this would fuck it up so badly…”

The last thing I wanted was to make things _worse_.

How did making Chloe _survive_, her whole family _survive_, somehow make things worse between us…?

I felt her shift on the bed and then saw her hand come into my view. Her thin fingers slid in the small cavern created by my hands and she squeezed my fingers into her palm. I looked up and found our eyes matched. She had the tiniest expression of empathy on her face, but there was also a significant amount of insecurity and hesitance. Those weren’t the expressions that Chloe _normally_ showed, but I’d seen just about _every_ expression Chloe had ever made, so while surprising, I wasn’t completely in the dark.

“I don’t get it,” she said slowly. Her tone was still somber. “I don’t… Get why you’d go through _all _that _shit_ after what happened…”

I pressed my thumbs against her fingers and looked between her eyes. “… Because I love you, Chloe…” I said, not breaking our eye-contact even when hers widened and she looked like she might. “If there’s one thing that I learned… It’s… You’re my _best friend_, and I can’t imagine my life without you… Not in this lifetime… Not in my _last_ lifetime… Not ever…” She continued to look at me, but I couldn’t read her expression. There were too many emotions for me to decipher it. So much for knowing _everything _about her.

“You mean it…?” she asked, her voice barely more than a subtle whisper.

I continued to stare and then slowly leaned forward and pressed my mouth to hers. This kiss, soft and sweet, was almost like our last one but there was an easy gentleness to it. This was a kiss that was more for reassurance than it was a declaration of my feelings.

“I mean it…” I said, barely letting my lips part from hers before I pushed them together again, “You’re the one I can’t live without, Chloe…”

She shuddered. I felt it in her wrist as it shook in my hands before she squeezed them tighter. She then pressed a little harder into my mouth, and I found the air in my lungs condensing into a tight ball. “I love you, Max…” she replied, and, slowly, she lowered me against the bed and didn’t stop kissing me.

We had so much to work through, from the past and present we shared and the ones we would never be able to show each other. We would never be able to understand everything that the other went through. But we were also the only ones who would be able to know, roughly, about the emotional roller-coaster that the other was going through. We would be the only two that would know each other across multiple lifetimes, and although we weren’t the same people each time, we always had each other.

And finally.

_Finally_.

We were _us_.


End file.
